Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

My wife’s niece, who lives with us at the moment, loves the TV show Cops. Personally I don’t enjoy it – I’ve never been into “gritty” – but as I’ve been passing by doing other things, I’ve picked up a pattern in the show.

Cop pulls a car over for some minor traffic infringement.

Cop: Anything I should know about in the car?

Offender: No.

Cop searches car, finds knife, drugs.

Offender: Those aren’t my drugs, they’re my friend’s drugs, I didn’t know they were there.

Or:

Traffic offense as before.

Car turns out to be stolen.

Offender: I don’t know anything about that, man, my friend just asked me to drive this car for him….

photo credit: laverrue

Very rarely indeed have I seen anyone straightforwardly say, “Yes, those are my drugs, I stole this car, you got me.” If you ever watch fictional detective programs, people always confess when confronted with the evidence (though even then they will usually self-justify: “I had to do it, he knew too much, it would have ruined my life if that got out”). As far as I can tell this is not how real criminals act.

It is how a lot of real successful people act, though.

You have a problem. What do you do?

Famously, the first of the 12 Steps of recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous is to admit that you have a problem. Taking responsibility is another key theme in recovery. This is because the founders of AA were smart enough alcoholics to realise that they were never going to recover if they kept deflecting responsibility onto their past, the people around them, and the alcohol itself.

As long as you see your behaviour as conditioned by outside forces against which you’re powerless, you won’t change. You have the ideal excuse for not changing: You can’t. You have no power.

This is why – to get political for a minute – I have a problem with the approach to social justice that assumes that people who have problems are entirely conditioned victims who must be rescued by more enlightened and empowered government agency workers.

I absolutely have a problem with the opposite viewpoint too, though, which says that conditions don’t matter and anyone can easily change if they choose to. Difficult conditions make change hard. But they don’t make it impossible unless you shift responsibility onto those conditions and refuse to accept responsibility for your own actions and choices.

A personal example

I often talk about my experience, more than 20 years ago now, of stress breakdown. It was a formative time in my life.

There are a couple of ways I could have looked back on that experience. For example, I could have said, “I was pushed into something that didn’t suit me, placed in a living situation that made things worse, not given any support. It was bad leadership that caused the whole thing. In fact, any time I’m unhappy with my job or things don’t go well for me, bad leadership is to blame. It’s other people’s bad leadership that’s ruined my life – people making decisions for me that turned out not to be the right ones.”

Or I can say, “OK, I made some bad choices. I chose to pursue a particular course of action and handed over a lot of power to some people who didn’t use it well. I had some struggles and disappointments because of my unrealistic expectations. I then had a very powerful emotional reaction to the events and let that destroy my health. But at the end, I got myself out of the situation, I learned some valuable life lessons, I developed an interest in stress management (and a sense of compassion) that’s enabled me to help other people, and overall, although that was the worst time of my life, I’m better and stronger for it. If I hadn’t learned those lessons then I would have had them to learn later.”

I can’t blame other people for the choices I let them make for me, at least not without acknowledging that I let them make those choices.

How language helps us avoid responsibility

We have a useful thing in English called the “passive voice”. This is when you say, for example, “Mistakes were made.” You’re not attributing the mistakes to anyone in particular. The truth could be, and very likely is, that you made at least some of those mistakes, but you’re not admitting it. The passive voice is a favourite of politicians and bureaucrats for this reason.

Or you can make the agent in the sentence some abstract concept. The economy, climate change, the Invisible Hand of classical economics, the historical imperative, manifest destiny. There’s a beautiful, beautiful parody of this approach in C.S. Lewis’s novel Out of the Silent Planet, in which Ransom, the hero, is attempting to translate the imperialist Weston’s speech justifying why Earth should conquer Mars (Wikipedia has a small extract, though not my favourite part). This is a sophisticated version of not taking responsibility for our personal choices and actions.

Another classic tactic is to describe ourselves with some word that absolves us from responsibility.

“Well, I’m an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs classification, so you can’t expect me to consider people’s feelings all the time.”

“I’m of Scottish descent, we don’t like to spend money.”

“I’m a ‘hard gainer’, I can’t put on weight so there’s no point in me exercising.”

(All three examples are categories I fall into.)

To think about further

What change have you ruled out because you feel helpless to achieve it?

What happens if you change your language about it?

What responsibility can you take?

What actions are available to you now that you didn’t see before?

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

Because my degree is in English, I’m especially alert to language. So I’m kicking off my How Not to Change Your Life series by looking at a way we often avoid changing: by obscuring our language in the hope that nobody will notice. (Often including us.)

To recap briefly, this series arose out of a conversation with a friend about how resources for change can be used to avoid change – resources like self-help books, therapy, and spiritual practice.

Often, the avoiders speak the language of the activity even more fluently than the changers. They know the practices inside and out. They may even be teachers or supposedly advanced practitioners (therapists, personal development gurus, religious leaders), because in order to avoid change by using a method for change, you need to know it inside and out. And nothing makes you look like a guru more than mastering (and even adding to) the language of your field.

I’m not just talking about the marriage therapist who has affairs with their clients or the preacher against homosexuality who meets rent-boys in cheap motels. That’s just ordinary hypocrisy. I’m specifically talking about using the language of change methods in order to hold onto the way you’ve always done things.

How to hide lack of change behind jargon

If you talk the talk often enough, fluently enough and emphatically enough, it’s possible to hide the fact that you’re not walking the walk (even from yourself). Businesspeople, especially, in my experience, HR and marketing people and people with management degrees, are classic for this, which is why Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons have been so popular for so long. If you talk enough about “operationalizing empowered synergies” it’s possible to ignore the fact that nobody’s achieving anything because they’re subtly punished for taking initiative or working together.

What I’ve noticed, in fact, is that avoiders are often incapable of using ordinary language about whatever they’re avoiding, presumably because that would reveal the fact that they’re avoiding it. If you can discuss what you’re doing in everyday language that anyone would understand, it leaves fewer places to hide. If you have an average amount of intelligence, you can probably see the problems and at least have some idea of what specific actions might solve them – and how that might be hard.

photo credit: Simon Blackley

How to reinforce the current status with jargon

Cults use this jargon tactic too, of course. A friend recently sent me some disturbing material about a well-known religious leader in New Zealand. One of the things that was disturbing about it was a scan of a couple of pages from a manual which tells members of the group how to approach the leader (that in itself is a worry). He’s referred to throughout as “Bishop”. Any time I see a title used as a name, red flags immediately go up. (If you’re constantly reminding people of power relations, there is a problem right there.)

Groups also use jargon as a way of defining who’s “in” and who’s “out”. To take another example from the material I just mentioned, it uses the phrase, “Remember, honour is the principle of release“. To anyone outside the group, that sentence carries no meaning whatsoever (I have no clue what it means exactly, but I can guess from context that it’s saying that honouring the group’s leader is very much a good thing and it will bring you some positive outcome).

And the more jargon the group produces, the easier it gets to speak in prefabricated sentences which reinforce the group’s viewpoint, and the harder it gets to speak in everyday sentences about problems that exist within the group. Catchphrases and cliches take over, and it becomes mentally easier to trot out a catchphrase than to actually think about what needs to be done to solve a problem.

How to avoid criticism with jargon

Catchphrases and jargon are great ways to deny problems and shut down criticism, too. You can accuse someone of having a “negative spirit” or “negative mindset”, of “thinking inside the box”, of using “false mind”, of “not being a team player” – there are a thousand of them. By labelling the act of criticism using a negatively loaded jargon term, you can deflect the issue neatly, since it now becomes about the critic’s flaws and inadequacies instead. Religion, psychology and business all have well-developed, rich jargons for shutting down critics in this way.

I remember criticising a group I was a part of and being told I was using “convergent thinking” (thinking which channels into only one way of solving a problem). This was particularly amusing since what I was questioning was the organisation’s tendency to believe that there was only one correct way to do anything. And it wasn’t a leader who said this to me, either, but a fellow group member.

How to avoid responsibility with jargon

The other thing about jargon is that it tends to remove responsibility from specific people to take specific actions. Jargon and technical terminology is usually abstract and theoretical. If you say, “We need to socialise the paradigm shift”, everyone may nod wisely, but nobody has been given a task. You can’t tell when they’ve done it, and, equally significantly, you can’t tell when they haven’t done it.  I’ll talk about this more in a future post on avoiding responsibility.

A challenge

So here’s my challenge – to myself, of course, first, but also to you.

This year I will be talking a lot on this blog about change, self-development and self-improvement. I pledge to you that I will use ordinary language that’s easy to understand. I pledge to be specific and concrete, and more practical than theoretical. I pledge that if I run into problems in my own personal development challenges (which is entirely likely, since I’m being ambitious this year), I will talk about them frankly and look for ways to continue to change, not to avoid change.

If you see me not doing this, call me on it (privately, first of all, for preference – mikerm at hypno etc. is the email address).

And take a couple of minutes now to think through your life and reflect whether you’re avoiding change, especially by your use of personal-development or psychological jargon and your reading of personal-development blogs, books, courses and so forth.

If you are, I suggest you talk to someone about it in everyday language and see what they say.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.